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Cyber Security project proposal

Senarath

Hi everyone,

I need to do a project related to Cyber Security for my Master’s degree. I have a background in network security. Can anyone suggest or guide me on a good, standard Cyber Security project topic? Thak you

  • 0

    Surely if you're doing a masters degree, you should be beyond standard topics and looking at something new and poorly studied.

  • 0

    There are so many possible topics that I'd suggest look at this differently - what network products do you particularly enjoy using? (E.g. gaming, streaming services, online shopping, bitcoining...) Whatever you pick I'm sure you'll find lots in the academic literature on the cyber security aspects of it, but it'll be easier for you to write about if you already know the context well.

  • +1 in reply to Simon Barker

    As my Master's tutors put it to us,

    • Bachelors degree: basic understanding of a subject
    • Master's degree: showing you know the methods of how to research a subject
    • PhD: showing that you can apply this to original research

    My literature review for my Master's was nearly a nightmare precisely because it turned out to be a poorly studied area. Fortunately I found two really good meta-studies which came to the same conclusion that it was a poorly (in fact pretty much zero) studied area, so at least I could show that I found those and that it wasn't just me being incompetent at finding papers! The colleagues on my course who researched well studied areas had a much less frustrating time.

    As it happens I've been sympathising with two acquaintances recently, both of whom are doing Masters as mature students (as I did), and both are wishing they'd picked more widely researched areas for their dissertations as they battle with their literature reviews... 

    In my experience what's being looked for is that you can show that you can filter the hundreds of research papers on your chosen topic to identify the good quality ones, and argue why those are the most relevant, and then based on that make a minute contribution of your own - which is very likely to be just replicating a previous piece of research in your own office etc. The outcome of the research is irrelevant,  all that matters is that you show that you know how to replicate it in a valid and reliable way.

    And how to write a very very boring dissertation with every statement [Yakhontova, 2006], no matter how obvious [Hyland & Jiang, 2017], referenced to a source [Rong et al, 2026]. Wink Excellent training for those of us who end up writing safety cases! Grinning

    Oh, and of course you'll be required to use a referencing style that is just slightly different from any referencing style built into your word processor of choice...just to show that you can do it...

    (P.S. I'm not knocking master's degrees, I would always recommend them to anyone who wants to go for it, a good one is a fantastic background for high quality engineering, but there just are some bits that make you scream with pain along the way.) 

    Ken Hyland, Feng (Kevin) Jiang, "Is academic writing becoming more informal?", English for Specific Purposes, Volume 45, 2017, Pages 40-51

    Guoyang Rong, Ying Chen, Thorsten Koch, Keisuke Honda, "Assessing data quality in citation analysis: A case study of web of science and Crossref," Journal of Informetrics, Volume 20, Issue 1, 2026, 101775

    Tatyana Yakhontova, "Cultural and disciplinary variation in academic discourse: The issue of influencing factors", Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 153-167

  • +1

    Ask AI? (i.e just copy that whole paragraph into the 'Google' search bar, and see what it's AI summary says)

    1. Decide if this is a technical question, or a Human factors question, and why!  Remember https://xkcd.com/538/ (still applicable even if it is 'old' - 5 years - humans haven't evolved)

    2. Ask why all the new stuff still doesn't work and simply swaps one problem for a potentially worse problem. E.g. passwords can be changed when compromised, but face ID?; providing finger prints for those with limb loss; Why the 'oldies' aren't accepting of passkeys - what do they know that tech nerds don't https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/passkeys. 

    3. Why networking effects make security a harder problem (see current supply chain attacks with auto update mode.., natural birthday attacks, not enough verified prime numbers )

    4. Layering: risk-reward layer tradeoff problems (getting locked out of all you banking because you can't verify on your broken phone / FIDO key).

    5. legal ramifications and pressures (e.g. banks don't want to accept [financial] responsibility for compromised transactions without legal requirements)

    6. retreat to Q1, which legacy technical area is most at risk ??

  • 0 in reply to Philip Oakley

    Decide if this is a technical question, or a Human factors question

    or both? (to my mind having a hole in either surface is problematic)

    Maybe have a look at some of the recent (and not so recent) compromises?

        - Andy.

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